Space companies, city: Safety is a priority

By Rye Druzin | rdruzin@mrt.com

Published 12:33 pm, Friday, October 31, 2014

Photo: Smiley N. Pool

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Behind a model of the company's Lynx spacecraft, XCOR Aerospace CEO Jeff Greason chats with Midland officials before a "wall breaking" ceremony at Midland International Airport on Friday, Aug. 15, 2014, in Midland. The event marked the start of construction on renovations on the XCOR hangar that will become XCOR's Commercial Spaceflight Research and Development Center Headquarters. ( Smiley N. Pool / Houston Chronicle ) less

Behind a model of the company's Lynx spacecraft, XCOR Aerospace CEO Jeff Greason chats with Midland officials before a "wall breaking" ceremony at Midland International Airport on Friday, Aug. 15, 2014, in ... more

Photo: Smiley N. Pool

Space companies, city: Safety is a priority

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Two crashes this weekend have shaken the private space industry, with one rocket exploding shortly after launch on Tuesday and a suborbital shuttle exploding in mid-air Friday afternoon.

The shuttle, named SpaceShipTwo and operated by Virgin Galactic, was reported to have exploded after being released over the Mojave Desert in California from its mothership, White Knight 2. The co-pilot was killed, and the pilot was seriously injured after he ejected from the craft, according to the Associated Press.

Earlier this week, an unmanned supply rocket called Antares exploded shortly after launch from a pad in Virginia.

The accidents come after Midland received a spaceport license in September, which allows for XCOR Areospace, a suborbital space company, to operate out of the Midland International Air & Space Port. Spacesuit company Orbital Outfitters is also setting up research and development facilities in the same area of the Spaceport Business Park as XCOR.

Virgin Galactic and XCOR are both currently based at the Mojave Air & Space Port out in Mojave.

XCOR CEO Jeff Greason told the Reporter-Telegram that Friday’s explosion was hard to experience but accidents have been a part of pushing new forms of transportation forward.

“Spaceflight is certainly hazardous and will be for a long time to come,” Greason said. “It’s an important part of how we fly that the FAA checks that we’re flying in a place and in a manner where the uninvolved public on the ground is not put at risk. That is part of why we have to be careful where we fly.”

John Love, the Midland City Council representative for District 2 and the board president of the Spaceport Development Corp., said the recent accident involving Virgin Galactic is a “tragedy” and his condolences go out to the families of the pilots.

But Love said that safety has always been at the forefront of conversations between the city, the airport, XCOR and the NASA.

“We want to look at the public and make sure we keep it safe and also make sure XCOR is doing everything they can with its design to make sure that it’s passengers and pilots are safe,” Love told the Reporter-Telegram.

While the two accidents have happened very close to each other, Love said that little will change in the discussions between XCOR and the city.

“We will discuss it and talk to them about it, but (the accident) is not something that’s going to require us to look at safety again because we are already looking at safety,” Love said. “Our safety standards are extremely high, and we would be looking at them with the same intensity that we would be if these two accidents did not happen.”

The process for the city to gain the spaceport license took longer than two years and involved checks to make sure that the approaches any space vehicles would be clear of people.

Members of the Spaceport Development Corp. reviewed a risk analysis study and discussed future airport zoning at a meeting back in April.

That’s when Stephen Matier, senior engineer and president at Silverwing Enterprises in New Mexico, spelled out the risks of spaceflight with fancy formulas, flight path trajectories and failure rates. He said the airport and company must look at future population growth in the Midland-Odessa area and form “what-ifs” for particular areas.

“If there’s any one thing in a licensing application process, the only ‘thou shalt’ you really have to deal with is making sure you’re protecting people on the ground to a standard level,” Matier said previously. “That level is the three in a million. The odds are less than three in a million someone on the ground is going to get hurt during a launch.”

During that meeting, Greason said there’s plenty of room in West Texas to fly missions that need to be flown.

“It’s just getting away from population centers,” he said.

Open space is one of the reasons XCOR chose Midland, said Dan Delong, XCOR’s vice president and chief engineer, during an FAA public hearing in April. Delong has personally flown in an airplane over the Permian Basin, and saw plenty of “emergency landing strips” along the criss-crossed roads between the oil rigs and pumpjacks.

“It happens to a lot of airports: They are outside city limits -- out by themselves -- and then suburbia gets built up around them,” Delong previously told the Reporter-Telegram. “Then there’s the question of being good neighbors.”

Although it was a dark day for the space industry, Greason said accidents will not be a stop to the private sector’s expansion.

“While we can’t know the future -- after Columbia was lost I got a lot of the same questions -- and nobody was scared off after the loss of that space shuttle because we’re always upfront that spaceflight does have an element of risk,” Greason said. “People should be prepared for that if they want to undertake this kind of adventure.”